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"From the darkest hours rises life in all its glory...From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and A Bridge Across the Ocean comes a new novel set in Philadelphia during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which tells the story of a family reborn through loss and love. In 1918, Philadelphia was a city teeming with promise. Even as its young men went off to fight in the Great War, there were opportunities for a fresh start on its cobblestone streets. Into this bustling town, came Pauline Bright and her husband, filled with hope that they could now give their three daughters--Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa--a chance at a better life. Their dreams are short-lived. Just months after they arrive, the Spanish Flu reaches the shores of America. As the pandemic claims more than twelve thousand victims in their adopted city, they find their lives left with a world that looks nothing like the one they knew. But even as they lose loved ones, they take in a baby orphaned by the disease who becomes their single source of hope. Amidst the tragedy and challenges that surround them, they learn what they cannot live without--and what they are willing to do about it. Under the Canopy of Heaven is the compelling story of a mother and her daughters who find themselves in a harsh world not of their making, which will either crush their resolve to survive or purify it"

"A wild, astonishing novel (by arguably England's most accomplished young writer) about Manhattan and Hollywood in the 1930s, Mayan gods, and a CIA operation gone terribly wrong--and the Booker short-listed Ned Beauman's magnum opus thus far. In 1938, two rival expeditions descend on an ancient temple recently discovered in the jungles of Honduras, one intending to shoot a screwball comedy on location there, the other to disassemble the temple and ship it back to New York. A seemingly endless stalemate ensues, and twenty years later a rogue CIA agent sets out to exploit it for his own ends, unaware that the temple is a locus of conspiracies grander than anyone could ever have guessed. Shot through with insanity, conspiracy, ingenuity, and adventure, showcasing Beauman's anarchic humor, spectacular imagination, and riveting prose, Madness Is Better Than Defeat teases, absorbs, entertains, and dazzles in equal measure"

What it's about: In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed. Friends and neighbors are shocked: could this ordinary middle-class Jewish-American couple really have sold atomic secrets to the Soviets?

Why you should read it: This haunting novel reveals a dark chapter of 20th-century American history in which anti-Semitism and Cold War paranoia collide with tragic results.

Introducing: Married American expats Sara and Gerald Murphy, who decamp to the French Riviera in the 1920s and become the center of a social circle that inspires F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night.

Look for: cameos by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso, among other Lost Generation luminaries.

You might also like: Paula McLain's The Paris Wife, whose characters and setting overlap with Villa America's as it depicts another glamorous but troubled marriage between cultural icons.